As we approach the end of Q1, we would like to update our community on the progress we have made in achieving our 2024 roadmap, which we announced on January 31st, 2024. Here’s a look back at the last two months.

Recap TL;dr: 

• The Qtum bridge will bring stablecoins to Qtum and is being audited by Certik. The audit is 99% completed. The “MetaMask Snap” wallet development is complete but needs to be audited and submitted to Consensys.  

• Qtum Core's UTXO implementation enables expansion into Ordinals technology and a new token standard called BRC-20. Multiple token standards will be available on Qtum, with a suite of tools that make it easier to inscribe. Development work is mostly complete, and rollout will commence shortly.

• Qtum Core: Upstream research is ongoing for Bitcoin Core v26 updates that may get merged into Qtum Core.

• Ledger Hardware Wallet support for Qtum Staking was released in February 2024.

Much of the delivered work is made possible due to the infrastructure work done during the 2021-2022 period. Items like activating Taproot, working on Janus or Qnode, or upgrading the EVM to Evmone weren’t very exciting, but they were necessary if we wanted to compete with other smart contract platforms. 

What’s nice about Qtum is that we can do more than simply compete with the “better than Ethereum” centralized projects. We can also incorporate new developments from the Bitcoin community and mix them in with the best thing Ethereum offers, which is its virtual machine.

This means Qtum can have multiple token standards like BRC-20 and ERC-20 on the same chain. Other blockchains are having discussions about “Extended UTXO support,” etc. We’ve been a UTXO smart contract platform since 2017.

We were able to mix the scaling solution called Segregated Witness onto our UTXO platform and allow better scaling of a smart contract platform without having to centralize the codebase. It’s interesting to see in 2024 how projects with bigger footprints are basically becoming Qtum seven years later. 

Let’s go over a few things that happened at Qtum in the last two months, starting with the bridge:

Progress report

Bridge

• The “Circle Bridged USDC Standard” contracts have been deployed on Qtum testnet and Ethereum Sepolia. You can find more information about this on Circle’s website: Bridged USDC Standard | Circle.

• The Circle set of contracts allows for a more trusted way of moving USDC from Ethereum to other EVM-compatible chains like Qtum. A bridge is required for the contracts deployed on Ethereum and Qtum to talk to each other.

• Contract addresses for the Bridged USDC Standard can be found on Sepolia at USDC - 0x833Ce55E31c35C9dccaC6f330e680BFB2a1eb4c5 and Qtum testnet - 0x5a87b9E3B83DfEc150A1A2E13dbA68590ea2907B

• The bridge has been developed and exists on the Qtum test network. You can see a beta version of it live at Qtum Bridge

• The development of MetaMask Snap is complete. The beta version has been deployed to Qtum’s GitHub repository and will be shared with Consensys to prepare an audit. If the audit goes well, we hope Qtum’s MetaMask snap implementation will be included in the Chrome Extension Store bundled with MetaMask. This “Snap” will allow users to interact with the Qtum bridge to move their ERC-20 assets onto Qtum and interface with a liquidity pool.

• The Certik bridge audit is 99% complete, and the final report will be released to the Qtum team soon. This took longer than expected because there were some fixes required and other fixes recommended. Qtum acknowledges that the bridge infrastructure is centralized, but we also know that it can become decentralized and democratic in the future if the community wants this. You can see the progress report on Certik’s website here: Qtum - CertiK Skynet Project Insight 

Qtum Testnet deployment at https://bridge.qtum.net

Bridge Todo List:

• Begin auditing Qtum “MetaMask Snap” and applying to bundle it into the greater MetaMask Chrome extension. Until this audit is completed, please remember that the Qtum MetaMask Snap integration is a beta release and shouldn’t be trusted.

• Start advertising the Qtum testnet bridge and beta version of Qtum MetaMask Snap to the community.

• Deploy Qtum testnet liquidity pools for Qtum/wUSDC pair.

• Publish the Certik audit once completed.

• Begin research on decentralization and incentives for community members to run bridge validator nodes. Currently, the bridge has no additional cost other than Ethereum and Qtum gas fees, so there’s no incentive to run a validator node.

BRC 20 

Work continues on the Ordinals implementation for the Qtum blockchain. This will effectively allow users to “inscribe” information onto the satoshi level of Qtum. This is usually a “more efficient” and more permanent way to do NFTs than a smart contract. It also leaves the door open for Qtum to start moving closer to the Bitcoin community. Let’s recap some of the work done on BRC20 / Ordinals on Qtum:

• We deployed the first version of ordinal_index to the test environment: it can consume events that comply with brc20 specifications, maintain user balances, transaction history, and token information, and provide API query services.

• Ordinals indexer and explorer are on the testnet. 

• Bitcoin ordinals QORD wallet was ported to the testnet. 

• Ordinals indexer was deployed on the mainnet.

• Code testing is ongoing.

• UI design finalized.

Qtum Core

Delegating Qtum tokens to an offline staking node using a Ledger device is now possible. This update took a while to get merged into “Ledger Live,” and it requires the user to use the Qtum Electrum wallet alongside their Ledger device. The Qtum Core team is also researching new items in Bitcoin v26.0 that could be applied to Qtum.

Bitcoin Core:: Bitcoin Core 25.1

Some Context From The Qtum Team

We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished in less than 60 days and excited about what comes next. Once we deploy the bridge on the Qtum main network and wUSDC begins bridging over, people will want to do something with it, and that means DeFi. There are currently no liquidity pools that offer Qtum paired with a stablecoin that we can see on CoinMarketCap, and we plan to fix that. 

The thing that slows everything down is the auditing process, and this doesn’t mean the auditors are a problem. We want them to move slowly. When issues are found, it takes time to fix them and get them re-checked. We ran into this with the bridge, and this is why it’s never smart to announce release dates when developing software.

Now that the bridge is live on the Qtum testnet and the MetaMask Snap wallet is developed, we’re going to enter a testing period while we wait for the wallet to be audited. It’s probably not a great idea to launch an audited bridge with an untested wallet on the Qtum mainnet, so we’ll keep the community updated on the wallet's audit process.

With the Ledger hardware wallet staking release, that wasn’t planned for this roadmap. We submitted that code literally four years ago and it finally made its way into production and just happened to get published in Q1 2024. Imagine if we had promised it would be “soon” after we submitted the code? Again, back to never promising release dates. 

Ordinals and BRC 20 are going to be interesting for Qtum. We very well may be the only chain that can natively support ERC 20 and BRC 20 and start comparing them. This will certainly allow us to do original research and publish our findings.

To finish off this summary section, we’d like to apologize for what appeared to be a few dormant years at Qtum. We completely exited China in 2019 and have no staff, contractors, properties, cash, crypto, or any legacy commitments there. We still have an amazing Chinese community and we’re grateful for all the support they constantly provide.

It’s a lot of work keeping Qtum upstream with Bitcoin and Ethereum. Imagine making Taproot play nice with the EVM but throw staking into the mix and have things work with staking that was designed for Proof-of-Work. And now you have to make this all familiar to Ethereum/Solidity developers so they don’t need to learn an entirely new platform. You get the idea, and this is why we needed a few years between 2020 and 2023 to get the platform ready to compete again.

We’ve got a lot more lined up for the next roadmap release. In fact, multiple development teams internally are already developing new items. There may even be overlapping roadmaps. This is all possible now because we spent a few years laying the groundwork for what you’re seeing today.

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